of Bert Pappenfuss and a poem by him on the lyric sheet? Oh, says Egon, he is a good friend of mine; we’ve set many of his poems to music, we sing them all the time. But not tonight: too many words. Would you like to meet him, he asks. Pappenfuss is little known in the US, but his work (translated by Andrew Duncan) jumped out at me from the pages of Rosmarie Waldrop’s anthology, 16 New (To American Readers) German Poets. Later I discovered—late again—that he was one of the heroic figures of the alternative art scene in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, publishing underground magazines, playing in rock bands, and re-vitalizing East German literature before the Mauerfall. I look down at the little photograph. Electric eyes peer out from under a plain cap brim and a thick nose bridged to a long fuzzy beard a la ZZ Top. I look up at Egon. Sicher, I say, “for sure.” The next day Egon would text me the phone number. (I would write to Papenfuss, but he would decline to respond.)
At some point they have to get ready to play and they leave me. I help myself to some salami and cheese on buttered dark yeasty bread. I remember the stunning judgment of a French baker who set up every weekend in the open market in Winterfeldplatz near where we lived two years ago in Schöneberg: “Don’t tell anyone I said this,” said the Frenchman, “but the Germans make the best bread in the world.” I look around. This small club is now filled with a couple hundred people. Time has gone down smoothly with the pils. I move through a room of foosball and waiting musicians, past the barroom, to the stage area, packed with fans. Smoke from cigarettes folds, furls, and uncurls in the red stage lights. Ann Jangle, the opening act from South Africa, introduces herself and launches into a ferocious and beautiful set of folk rock accompanied on her acoustic guitar by Cami Scoundrel on electric bass. Jangle’s voice hangs in a middle range, capable of dynamic and dramatically meaningful changes. She has an impressive tawny lion’s mane of hair. The duet plays with sympathetic joy and personal relish.
Then Freygang Band takes the stage. They kill it that night, and for the first time I feel the great positive energy of Reunification Day—not between East and West, and certainly not between left and right, but between musicians and their audience. Teen fans slam against fans dating from the Mauerfall, and devotees from the band’s earliest days welcome the physical contact from the pit’s periphery. Everyone sings along, wet with each other’s sweat and the sporadic fountain of beer from an over-jostled bottle. The music ends promptly at 10. This well-known club for alternative music and culture, that had started as a squat in 1990, has had its unruliness trained back by gentrification: new neighbors insisting on the German institution of the 10 pm curfew (I think of the scolding notice in the laundryroom of my building: “No Washing After 22.00 Uhr”).
Cooling off outside the club, Eric, a young man who had introduced himself earlier, approaches me. Hey, American guy, I want to ask you something. Wide eyes and a wide smile play on the most animated expressive German face I have ever seen. He could’ve been an actor (maybe he is one). Hey, let me ask you: is war the last opinion? What? He repeats the question. I repeat the question, not quite sure what he is asking. Is war the last opinion? Is he asking me if war is the last word in an argument between nations? Or if history, in order to be written, requires war, and victors in war to tell their side of a story? Whatever. Given the context, I get the drift; there can only be one answer.
No, I say sincerely. The back of his hand gently thumps my chest. Everywhere I go, he says, around the world, in Europe, in South America, I ask this of Americans, “is war the last opinion.” They all say “yes.” You are the first American to say “no.” Well, I say, I think you’re hanging out with the wrong people; I’m not the only American who would say that. Yeah, but what kind of country do you live in? There’s no democracy there. Everything is controlled by money. Your democracy is controlled by money. You can’t even vote for who you want to, you can only vote for the names on the card. That’s not true, I say, but I couldn’t deny that the political system was appearing more like a plutocracy, what with Trump still leading the run for the Republican nomination and billionaires funding super-PACS to protect their interests. Is Trump your next president, he asks. He has a crazy smile on his face. I can’t tell if he is being friendly and ironical, or menacing.
No, I say, but right now he is our Berlusconi. What about the refugees, I say, exercising my prerogative non-sequitur, I’m trying to write about what people think here, and nobody’s asking people like you. Oh, Mann, he says, I should take you to my parents, in Saxony, in Dresden. My father is an engineer. When the wall came down, he lost everything. Reunification ruined him. Now he’s spent 25 years paying into the new system. And the refugees, they want to come here and take. And he says, “That’s my money, they want to rob me!” Hey, American guy, we are going to a very alternative party, you must come. But I have only my bike here, I say. You’ll get it later, come with us. A taxi pulls up. This is our taxi, he says. I get in with him and four other friends.
I can’t make out in what direction we are heading; I have gotten turned around too many times in pursuit of my two-wheeled anti-nationalist protestors. Maybe we’re heading south into Kreuzberg’s more derelict bar scene. The mood in the taxi is frothy, though the German chatter jumping between my five party Virgils is too fast for me to follow. Eventually we pull into an apartment lot. The door opens. Ann Jangle and Cami Scoundrel, the musicians from South Africa, are standing there with drinks in hand. We’re leaving, Ann says, this party sucks. The others de-cab, and Ann and Cami get in. I stay seated. I have no idea where we are, at least I’m in a taxi. The door closes and Ann punts an address to the driver and we take off.
Hey, I say, you guys were fantastic tonight. You speak English, Ann says, oh thank god, where are you from? Washington DC, I say. Oh, man, I’d love to play there, says Ann. Well you should, I say, you were great. Where are we going? To a bar in Kreuzberg, she says. A flurry of chitchat gets us acquainted and I explain why I’m there. Where are the refugees? Oh, man, they’re everywhere, says Ann. But where? Just look around you, human misery is everywhere in this city. Go to Warschauerstrasse or Hallesches Tor, (two metro stops in East Berlin), you’ll find them. (I would go the next day, but I never saw any refugees there, only grimy career bums, young bushy beards with dreads hanging or roped back, playing guitars, drinking beer, and hanging out on narrow strips of trashy grass with happy well-behaved dogs.) You’ll find them, says Ann, the situation. Cami has to leave in two days because of her passport situation, she adds. Borders. There shouldn’t be any borders. You shouldn’t need some piece of paper to go where you want, where you need to go. (A world without borders. It sounds like an anarchist theme, but I’d hear it over and again, more centrally au courant in Berlin now—and of course the existence of the EU is predicated, to begin with, on loosening control of the borders.)
The bar is a simmering warm Kreuzberg scene, crowded, edgy, friendly. Everyone seems to know each other but to come from radically different sectors of society. At one table, a beefy goth guy in studded leather, make up, spiked hair and a metal bolt shooting out of his chin is talking to a thin dapper cat in a cardigan and tie. Girls on the lam from American sororities rub shoulders at the bar with broad, thick-handed guys in durable work shirts. At least in the bar it seems to be a world without borders. I ask Ann and Cami where they are living. “Nowhere,” is the answer. Where are they sleeping? In the flats of friends, or on a park bench. On a park bench? Yeah, says Cami, I woke up on one this morning. Were you guys paid for the performance tonight? Yeah, says Ann, fifty bucks. Fifty bucks for both of you? Yeah, and I sold a few cd’s, but we’ve already spent that. She hands me a Mexicali shot. What’s this, I say. It’s for your health. We clink and bottom up.
Ann turns to play a dice game with a huge guy at the bar who looks like he has just walked off a Fassbinder set, Expressionism itself sitting at a bar, killing time as civilization wanes into darkness. I ask Cami about her life and her music, what inspired her in each, and she tells me about Cape Town and the music she loves, such as Fuzigish (the ska punk band from Gauteng) and the slam poets, Kyle Louw and Roche du Plessis, as well as her grandfather, who emigrated with such resourceful determination to South Africa from Lithuania. Are you sure you guys have a place to stay tonight, I say, you shouldn’t be sleeping on park benches (I am showing my age and sheltered lack of experience). Another round
